Overview

Online behavioral advertising (OBA) refers to the practice of
tracking users across web sites in order to infer user interests and
preferences. These interests and preferences are then used for
selecting ads to present to the user. There is great concern that
behavioral advertising in its present form infringes on user privacy.
The resulting public debate -- which includes consumer
advocacy organizations, professional associations, and government
agencies -- is premised on the notion that OBA and privacy are
inherently in conflict.

Adnostic is a practical architecture that enables
targeting without compromising user privacy. Behavioral profiling and targeting
in Adnostic takes place in the user's browser. The ad network
remains agnostic to the user's interests.

Our technical paper discusses the
effectiveness of the system as well as potential social engineering
and web-based attacks on the architecture. One complication is
billing; ad-networks must bill the correct advertiser without
knowing which ad was displayed to the user. We describe a
cryptographic billing system that directly solves the problem. We
implemented the core targeting system as a Firefox extension and
report on its effectiveness.

Adnostic is a collaboration between Stanford University and NYU.
The research is funded by the
PORTIA and
PRESIDIO projects.
Adnostic was previously known as Privads.